Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain continued to criticize Barack Obama today for his comments characterizing small town Pennsylvanians as "bitter." Both Senator Clinton and the Republican Presidential Nominee reiterated their argument that these comments show an "elitism" on the part of Mr. Obama.
This comes after an entire weekend of breathless dissection of the controversy by mass-media pundits, most of whom seemed to agree that this will likely damage Senator Obama's chances of wooing white working class voters in the rural parts of the state.
There is a particular brand of irony here that I have yet to see fully explored.
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The essence of Obama's commentary was to acknowledge that people in economically depressed areas such as rural Pennsylvania are angry and frustrated because for over a quarter of a century politicians have promised to help them, but once elected have consistently turned their back.
The point of this was ostensibly to explain why voters in such areas of the country consistently vote on so-called "social" issues rather than economic ones: becuase they have been lied to by candidates of both parties for so many years that they don't believe anyone who promises to do anything about their economic situation.
Clinton and McCain wasted little time in denouncing this statement as "elitist" and "out of touch." Clinton raised her criticism on the stump, claiming that when she travelled the state, she found Pennsylvanians to be "hard working" and "resilient," and that it was "patronising" to suggest that they harbored angry feelings about the government.
What is most interesting to me about this drama as it unfolds is the irony inherent in the alternate Narrative that has been put forward in response to Obama's comments. Clinton and McCain, despite their own inconvenient biographies, both insist Obama is an "elitist" who is "out of touch" with the lives of rural Americans. Clinton in particular has moved quickly to try to cast herself in contrast to this, as someone who understands that they aren't "bitter," or angry or frustrated.
In this Clinton/McCain narrative, people from small towns in economically depressed areas are in fact stoically bearing the burden of economic hardship, nobly and resiliently continuing to struggle. They are hard-working patriotic Americans just trying to do their best, or so goes the implicit subtext.
This is, not coincidentally, the same narrative that has been employed by the Republican party for over a generation. It is the narrative born of the efforts of the wealthy and powerful to soothe the ranks of the working poor, to pacify them, to defuse their anger and channel it into jingoistic nationalism.
"We're not bitter" say the stickers distributed by the Clinton campaign. The unspoken corollary of this is that economically-struggling Americans are content with the status quo, that they remain loyal to Washington, that they will patiently endure the insult of being abandoned by their government until the day it miraculously remembers them and sends the help they need ... 30 years late.
The Clinton/McCain narrative of small town conciousness is the narrative of subservience. It is the narrative of an underclass which accepts its powerlessness as unavoidable, which acquiesces in the taboo against questioning the fairness of their situation. It is the classic and cynical narrative of a class of people who can be won over with sanctimonious and transparently dishonest pandering.
Sadly, although not surprisingly, it is also a narrative to which the majority of political commentators in the mass-media subscribe. They are, after all ... the elite.
What is lost in all of this is the people themselves. Already, many struggling Americans (myself included) have come forward to say that Obama is correct, that yes, they are indeed "bitter." More than bitter, they are mad as hell. It is Clinton and McCain, they say, who are the ones truly taking a patronizing tone. Who are they, to deign to tell people they're not angry? Clinton, the multi-millionaire corporate attorney? McCain, the aristocratic progeny of two generations of four-star admirals? What do they know about life on the edge of poverty? What do they know about being powerless? What do they know about being ignored by thier own government?
To say that their cries of "elitism" smack of hypocrisy would not do justice to the word.